Economic disparity fueling the winter of our distrust: Tim Rutten

Trust is as important in the lives of nations as it is in those of individuals.

That’s why the results of a comprehensive new national survey ought to be a matter of real concern. According to the most recent findings of the Associated Press-General Social Survey, fewer than one in three Americans now believe that most other people can be trusted under any circumstances. A wide variety of polls and other surveys have conclusively documented Americans’ growing disenchantment with nearly every institution in their lives. Trust in everything from government to the press and, even, churches now is at or close to an all-time low. Fewer than six in 10 people believe the news media can be trusted; just 46 percent think office-holders deserve their confidence and both parties’ congressional delegations currently have single-digit approval ratings.

This new study, though, is the first to report just how mistrustful of each other we’ve become.

The General Social Survey — or GSS, as it’s known — is conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center and examines and correlates demographic and attitudinal data with particular reliability. Social scientists frequently rely on its findings, which are collected in face-to-face interviews with a national sample of more than 50,000 respondents. In polling terms, that’s pretty much the gold standard.

The GSS first started asking the trust question in 1972, when more than half the respondents said they trusted their fellow Americans. This year, two-thirds of those surveyed told the researchers that, “you can’t be too careful” when you deal with other people. According to co-sponsor AP, the poll found that fewer than one in three people trust the clerks who handle their credit cards, other drivers on the road or anyone they meet while traveling.

A mistrustful nation isn’t just a coarser, less civil place to live. There’s good evidence internationally that societies where people distrust each other are more corrupt and far less dynamic economically. Carried into politics, this street-level breakdown in our confidence is one pretty good explanation for our increasingly bitter partisanship and the growing belief that compromise is a form of betrayal. Mistrust even poisons relations within our political parties. Eight of the 12 Republican senators up for re-election next year are now facing primary challenges from members of the GOP’s Tea Party faction. Even though many of the incumbents are among the chamber’s most consistently conservative members, the insurgents’ common theme is that the senators have “betrayed” conservative principles and cannot “be trusted.”

Don’t look for any improvement in the trust level — and in all those things that flow from it — any time soon. Researchers say that a person’s trust in others is fairly firm by the time they hit their mid-20s and every generation since the baby boomers has had less confidence in others than the one that came before.

So, why are we so mistrustful of our fellow Americans? Why, for example, do record numbers of our people — whatever their politics — believe they need to keep firearms in their homes, even though crime continues to decline nationally to nearly historic lows?

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Researchers are divided on the causes, though several point to the atomized lives of virtual interaction, entertainment on demand and partisan news sites that seem to be part of the new digital age. The Internet’s unmediated, echo-chamber treatment of “news” — some of it legitimate, much of it false or partially so — seems to promote a greater feeling of insecurity and suspicion. Social scientist Robert Putnam, who has spent most of his career studying the nation’s “social capital” told AP that “Americans have abandoned their bowling leagues and Elks lodges to stay home and watch TV. Less socializing and fewer community meetings make people less trustful.”

Others, noting that the downward trajectory of social trust has been propelled almost entirely by an erosion of confidence among white Americans, think economics may be at the root of this decline. They point, in particular, to the fact that trust has declined precipitously as middle class incomes have eroded and the income gap between the rich and rest of us has widened. People who see their own economic security bleeding away while others prosper are almost sure to conclude that the game is rigged against them — and the real danger comes when vague mistrust hardens into the bitterness of social antagonism.

Certainly, that’s the case in California, where the income gap is the largest in the nation and growing worse with no end in sight. The general perception is that state has divided into two societies — a prosperous coastal belt and a depressed inland. As the Economist recently put it, “Cities like San Bernardino and Fresno reek of poverty and sadness.”

There’s ample evidence, moreover, to show that the Great Recession’s corrosive impact has fallen with particular force on Los Angeles County, America’s largest, and the Inland Empire. Recent studies by Stanford’s Center on Poverty and Inequality and the Public Policy Institute of California found if you consider factors like cost of living and housing expenses, Los Angeles County’s poverty rate rises from the official 18 percent to a staggering 27 percent. The San Bernardino-Ontario-Riverside area has more poor people than any other region among the country’s 25 largest metropolitan regions. That area also has experienced America’s biggest decline in median income over the past 10 years. In San Bernardino, household incomes have declined 13 percent.

San Bernardino County’s official poverty rate is 20.4 percent, while inside the city of San Bernardino 31.1 percent of the people live below the poverty level and 17.5 percent are jobless. While one in four California children now lives in a poor household, 8 percent of San Bernardino’s children live in what the census labels “extreme poverty,” which is to say in a household with an annual income half the official poverty level of $23,492 for a family of four.

The actual employment picture is similarly bleak. The official joblessness rate is 8 percent, the nation’s fifth worst. If you factor in those who are underemployed or simply have become so discouraged they’re no longer even looking for work, however, only Nevada has a worse jobs picture among the 50 states.

California may have the nation’s biggest economy — eighth in the world, if we were an independent nation — but it’s also now home to one in three of all America’s welfare recipients. Perhaps worst of all, over the past four years the number of state residents earning middle class incomes has fallen by 75,000, while the numbers of rich and poor have grown. Whatever its size, that describes a Third World rather than developed economy.